TRASHFUTURE - *UNLOCKED* The Banana Ball Shuffle feat. Lauren Walker

Episode Date: April 7, 2026

We're unlocking a bonus episode this week due to every possible scheduling conflict happening at the same time! Lauren from Batting Around joins Riley, Nova, and Hussein to talk sports - what’s Banana Ball? What’re the odds of Neom SC winning the Saudi Premier League? What’s going on in Utah Mammoth player Sean Durzi’s brain? And more importantly, can we bet on it? Check out Batting Around here! MAYOR ALERT Get tickets to the three performance dates for No God No Mayors in London on 25-26 April! The link is here! MILO ALERT Check out Milo’s tour dates here: https://www.miloedwards.co.uk/liveshows NATE ALERT Lions Led By Donkeys will be performing live in London on 29th May and you can get tickets here! Nate's band Second Homes is about to release their debut album, and you can stream / preview / preorder it on Bandcamp here! Trashfuture are: Riley (@raaleh), Milo (@Milo_Edwards), Hussein (@HKesvani), Nate (@inthesedeserts), and November (@postoctobrist)

Hello, trash future listeners. We have all had scheduling conflicts, and as a result, we're unlocking a bonus episode for this week's free one. But it's a very fun episode featuring Lauren Walker from batting around, and we hope you enjoy it. Also, a few plugs up front. First, you may have heard that no gods, no mayors will be performing live at Big Belly Comedy in London on 25th and 26th April. There's a link in this episode's description where you can get tickets, and they're going fast, so definitely check that out if you're interested. In addition, Milo is currently on tour in Australia, and you can get tickets to all of his shows down there via the link that's also in the description. And finally, I've got some plugs. First, Lions Led by

Donkeys will be performing on 29th May at Rich Mix in London. There's a link in the show notes, again, where you can get tickets. And in addition to this, my band, Second Homes, just started pre-sales on our debut album on Band Camp. It was produced by Friend of the Show and Bottoman alumnus Dan Beckner, and there's a link in the description where you can check it out. We'll be back the bonus feed with a new episode in just a few days, and there'll be a new free episode next Tuesday. Thanks for being a listener. Thanks for your patience.

And have a good one. Look, none of you understand that there's a new orb, okay? Okay. That's true. That is true. When I do my kind of rigorous, like, spiritual examine at the end of each day, I think to myself about my weaknesses, and one of them is, I don't understand there's a new orb.

Yeah, like none of you have actually really metabolized that there's a hot new orb on the scene. Just when I grasp the ones that exist, another one just shows up. This is how it always is. You know, you get in and you think my orb's going to be the orb for all time. And it never is, you know, because there's always a newer orb. Yeah, look, you know what? It's planned or obsolescence. And I think it's actually, thank you very much.

No, I'm going to tell, look, a hot new orb is dropped on the scene. Discord, I don't know if you know this. Discord orbs are a new type of reward earned through performing quests. How many can I use on a single ape? Well, I don't know if you can use them on an ape yet. What I do know is that they allow you to change your profile picture on Discord. One, two, that you get them by watching ads.

Quest are watching ads, by the way. A quest? Okay. Yeah. A medieval night. So JD Vance, who is still in a Discord server with a bunch of like 15-year-old neo-Nazis, is going to be raking in the orbs then. Oh, he is rich and, oh, he's orb rich, is J.D. Van.

Unlike many of the other orbs we've talked about, these are not, there's not a physical orb. This is not the FIFA club. My fucking time. Oh, I'm sorry. I'm sorry if the digital future passed you by, right? That every, it's all computer, everything's computer. The orbs are computer now. Yeah.

And they said, Discord said, the chief marketing officer of Discord said, we're dedicated to making quests the most authentic, engagement-centric, advertising product in all of gaming. and we're taking a huge step on this today. I've never thought what if Discord could be more exploitative, but I guess when you work at Discord, that's what you have to be. Well, I'll tell you what happened. Why this has happened is that Discord is trying to IPO and they're desperate to increase their revenue.

So they invented Orbs and Quest. I'm the ad guy who went to Discord and I just unveiled on my whiteboard. I just wrote on the whiteboard orb. Everyone stood up and they applauded. Yeah, that's right. No, we are here with a TF bonus episode today. have a guest who's, I think, been quite a long time coming, very excited to have her on. It is batting around Lauren Walker, and we're going to talk baseball, football, other sports,

possibly high a lie. Lauren, welcome to the show. How do you all? Thanks for having me on. Welcome, Lauren. I completely missed the intro on account of I was getting a package. Yeah. It was your orbs they sent you.

Yes, of course. Thank you for the orbs. Obviously, really appreciate them because they are physical. Can I just go back for a second? Are they called discorbs? we need to call Discord right away. That would be a better name. Yeah, what you've done there is kind of

unwaged labor for Discord in branding. What if you just called them discs? Yeah. Whoa, that's crazy, dude. This is, yeah, okay, this is like season one Mad Men shit where we're firing on all cylinders. Uh-huh. I mean, there are actually, I've like planted another season one

Mad Men reference later in the show. Oh, okay, good. It's nice to know that that's out there because previously, if you were looking for those in the show, you were delusional. Whereas now, the special kind of schizophrenic where you think we're not talking to you through a mass medium, but we're talking to Don Traper.

Being madman stalked? Yeah. I'm being madman stalked. People keep smoking near me and all the ties have got very skinny. One guy came up to me and said, he didn't think about me at all, which I thought was weird. But no, we got Lauren on, and we're going to be talking sports.

So you know, I'm going to answer number one, once and for all, my question, which is, what the fuck is banana ball and why does it seem so popular in what you could refer to as America be? That's a fascinating question. It's also one that like the baseball community has had a really, the baseball community, the people who get paid to talk about baseball. Has had a really hard time figuring out. The people of baseball. People of baseball preference, yes. Banana ball, if you don't know somehow, is the biggest baseball-like entity on TikTok. A lot of baseball purists hate it

because its stated goal is to make baseball fun and its audience is primarily young lemon. And those are things that baseball just historically always hated. That's one way I think about banana ball. The other way to think about it is a product that people go to that's more of like an entertainment lifestyle brand at this point than it is like an actual sports product.

Like the history of it, it goes back to like 2022 and they were sort of like a real baseball team. They were like associated with like a college summer league. They played actual baseball. but like they were goofy with it like they'd grill on the sidelines and over time specifically in the pandemic they really blew up in a huge way by doing silly dances on TikTok which as far as my understanding as in Alabana is the entire platform still because silly dancers have never happened in baseball like yeah no inevitable showdown between the baseball crank and the banana

ball crank that's right I like to imagine like um like in in in deadwood they're getting the baseball scores from like the 1893 world series or whatever like like four weeks later by telegram. I need to know, did the pitcher on stilts successfully complete a backflip, Al? Of course, we never mentioned the nested layers of Deadwood references, which we have been putting in over previous episodes. That's right. It's every time someone speaks to the British accent,

it's a reference to Al Sware Engine, actually. All our brains are fully calcified in the years of the golden age of television from like 2008 to like 2017. Yeah, that's right. back from it. Yeah, yeah, where it's like Timothy Oliphant

just gets to do what he wants. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I'm unconventional by our standards because I'm primarily into Bordhawk Empire, but,

you know. A real Nucky Thompson head. You don't see too many of them. No, no. Banana ball seems fun because it's like, they've taken baseball

and we're like, what if it was also a TikTok hype house, but also baseball? And it's like, this is the single most popular sport in America overnight, it seems.

Yes, which is crazy. Literally, like they had more followers on TikTok, than any MLB team. And they are selling out like football stadiums, 70,000 seat football stadium.

That's like kind of the new take on it. People are now burned out on it because like actually going to these games, it's impossible to get tickets. They're super expensive when you can get one. And then like you're just watching people film TikToks on the field. Like it's not like a Harlem Globetter's thing where like it's like an entertaining version of the sport you can watch.

Like it and they've got it's custom novels now. If you want to go to the filming of a TikTok? Right. Exactly. This is like the Gen Alpha version of like coordinated like stunt dances. What if phones but way too much? Yeah. Well, what if everything's computer extended to baseball?

We thought it was going to be something to do with Sabre metrics, but actually it was what if baseball was about like nine different groups of people doing unconnected TikTok dances around a diamond while sort of mostly forgetting to play baseball. Yeah, I was going to say, so at no point like does baseball really get played in this, despite it being kind of centered around baseball? There's like baseball like things happening on the field. Someone will be standing at the diamond swinging a bat And occasionally there will be like contact and the ball will travel to the outfield

But there's less and mess of that because that is baseball and that is boring And they want to get rid of the boring stuff and just do the fun TikTok dances Like the most successful thing they're doing right now is actually the banana ball cruise You know it's washed when there's a tenuous connection for a cruise event I also I love the banana ball cruise to just like and it's out again Yeah, it's another It's another part If you basically, it's if you don't bunt

It just goes out You cannot fit a regulation banana ball field onto a cruise ship It just can't be done No, so it's just like the height Dancing like over and over again Amazing It's the infection of TikTok

Into like everything that it touches It's like a kind of dancing plague really So when are we pivoting to video? Yeah, maybe actually pretty soon but I don't think we'll be dancing to watch some space, but, right, it's a, this is just something that I, because I see it. And often people, is this Christian? Is this Mormon? Is this what is this? And it's like, no, it's just TikTok. It's just the dancing plague that's infecting everything it touches by

replacing everything with TikTok dances. I would say that probably is somewhat Christian and somewhat Mormon. Just given like the excess of guys who are like almost professional baseball players that they rely on, it's very Mormon coded from time to time. like sexy in a safe Mormon way I think as part of the appeal to a lot of the audience. Yeah. Do you think it's like some minor league or like Tampa Bay like level

baseball player made like a cursed monkey's paw wish that he wanted to play, he wanted to sell out stadiums. I want to yeah and you kind of go well I want to play baseball in a god-honouring way which of course the fallen and heathen sports of baseball

does not allow you to do in major league. I think this is so much closer to the truth that you guys Like, we're doing a bit here, but this is also pretty literally what happened and how it was built. Like, this is basically a supercharged form of, like, what the minor league baseball system already does. Like, you're just trying to get people to come out and pay eight bucks for a ticket and you've got to find somebody to entertain them. In normal baseball, it's like, okay, we're into like a president's race, put a big mascot head on someone, run around the field in between innings. This is just like, we could make a lot of money doing that, like, cranked up to 15. God, it's just, it's so strange just to, like, see a cultural phenomenon emerge.

from whole cloth, but have it be copy paste of so many other cultural phenomena in the sort of, in the great sort of machine that turns everything into TikTok dances. And what's very to be is we don't really know how big it can get before it, like, implodes on itself. Like, it's already at the point where they're selling out their world tours, like, before any of them even get announced. Now it's like they're parting with ESPN to broadcast games. They're, like, and ESPN is getting out of the baseball game.

ESPN is not going to cover Major League Baseball after, I think, next year. Like, they got rid of the deal. but they will be broadcasting banana ball only? Yes, it's going to be a banana only league. It's going to be football, banana ball and like 10 minutes of hockey. Oh my God. That's so weird. It's like the TikTok algorithm killed baseball.

And also, why would you watch it on ESPN? You watch it on TikTok. ESPN has to become more TikTok-like because TikTok is the thing that survives. Yeah. God damn. It's also weird in the context of like baseball is actually growing as well. Like the rumors that baseball is dying are kind of. of inaccurate at this point, like the sport has seen growth. It's just not seeing the venture capital

300% year over year growth that banana ball has. So that's where the eyeballs go and that's where all the money's going now. I'm looking forward to like the pee-wee banana ball league. And if I was American, I'd put my son in the pee-wee banana ball league and I'd yell at him. I'd yell at him for not doing the dances properly. It's even funnier to do that if it's a bubble though, to be like your kid grows up and is like hits 18. It's like I did like 15 years of. higher lie lessons because my dad was convinced it was going to be the next big thing.

Yeah. I became the rival to fast Eddie at yo-yoing. And now I just have to go get a job as an accountant? What the fuck? There's a lot of like extreme sports that are like that.

I remember like meeting a guy who was like he was doing some extreme sport which was sort of like an evolution of roller skating. And I can't remember what it was called but it was like briefly popular in like the mid 2000s. Oh, is it soaping?

I can't. It might. No, yes, it could have been, but it might have been something else. There were lots of these, like, random sports that was sort of showing up. And for, like, three years, he, like, went all in trying to sort of be a professional and trying to get, like, quicksilver to sponsor him. And then it was just like, yeah, like, the sport doesn't exist. You're basically the only one doing it now. And I'm not sure what he does.

But, like, yeah, this feels like it's very much similar trajectory. I think that we'll know that at Banana Ball has reached escape velocity when the Saudis start, like, astroturfing a league in Saudi Arabia. A banana rival. Yeah, it's going to happen. And I think, like, to that point, a very weird angle of this is, like, the owner of banana ball who runs the whole thing.

One of his, like, weird bits that is also, like, a real thing in the organization is he lets everyone pay what they think they're worth. Like, that's the actual salary. Like, they set their own salaries, which I'm, leaves me to believe they're all incredibly underpaid for how lucrative this is. Yeah. That's just one of the many weird. I'm not even a good baseball player.

I'm just doing TikTok dances. You shouldn't pay me more than 50K or whatever. It's vintage moleman stuff. Like, when the, when he started, were sending guys to the major, to the actual professional baseball. Like, they were graduating guys into that system. And now they do just hire based on like, okay, you can walk on stilts.

So you're in. Yeah, I was in. The stilt's guy is a very important component of their whole system. Fucking God. Okay. Sure. I was, I was, I came up in the banana ball draft. It was, so I guys, I was in, I was in the Savannah Bananas.

And then I was actually drafted to the Toronto Blue Jays. And it was weird because I only really know. walk on stills. I'm not that good at baseball. And yet I'm their switch hitter, which is crazy. It's a little anti-blue jays material from a long-term disappointed Canadian. There we go. No, they do this year. Yeah. Yeah. Anyway. I have a question, related question. Are people still playing Blaisball? Are people still following that? Is that still a thing? No, Blaisball is kind of died in Fort your death a couple of years ago. I think the guy who was running it got kind of tired of it. You know, the server cost for exploding. That's one of the many like baseball pop culture things that

just explodes because there's no money in it unless you're promoting League itself. Surely that wouldn't happen again. No, never. Not to us anyway. No, no, no. I predict sunny skies and clear sailing for banana ball, especially when like the sort of, again, very strange man in charge of it, who again, feels

evangelical or Mormon, even though we don't know for sure. It was like, great. I'm going to go invent a new kind of banana ball that's played only in Neon. It's going to be wonderful. Desert banana ball. Yeah. Speaking of Neum, I knew that any sports episode that we're doing would be remiss. I'd be remiss. I'd be remiss.

if I didn't include a Neom sports update. Of course, yeah. Have they sorted out the holding the football matches on the kind of suspended 500 meters in the air pitch thing? No, no. Okay, okay. They haven't. Right now, so Neom FC is now one of the best funded football clubs in the entire world. Perfect.

Sick, okay. Well, they're going to need that for like transfers after anyone who goes for a corner to energetically gets sort of like, like Operation Condor Death Flighted off the side of the pitch. Anyone who makes an own goal, they get escorted to a different changing room and then there's a new guy there

the next day. So basically what happened is that Neom FC, there was a really good article in The Athletic about this, which was about the how they made Neom FC, which is, it's now based in Tabuk, which is not far away.

It used to be like a normal, like a normal sort of Saudi third string team. So they were like, you know, struggling to get like a dozen people in when it was called its old name Al-Sacor. And I just, I want to read a brief quote from this article. It says, we're here to cheer, says Farras, a former youth player of Al-Sacore who at 18 had given up on his dream of playing professional football in the Saudi leagues.

He felt no loss for his own club and was now all in for Neom SC. He was part of the Neom unit, previously known as the Al-Sacore unit. So Neum Football Club has a firm. Fantastic. Perfect. I've always thought that it would look great

having these kind of vertical walls of glass with a bunch of guys setting off like road flares and stuff. They have a group of ultras, the neon unit. Well, I didn't realize that like something I thought was a very local American phenomenon was a global phenomenon

because like I didn't realize that football, soccer had their own Oakland A's where they're just going to move a team to the desert and maybe build the stadium at some point. These guys are going to get like, there's going to be a kind of firm rivalry between them and Yumeraba, you know, entirely linear

sissy, you'll never sing that. What's the Neon, like, equivalent to the Millwall brick? Oh. What can you smuggle into Neum to do violence with? Well, because also, like, none of it's made of brick, right? So it was just like, it's going to be, like, it's not to be like a glass thing of some kind.

Oh, you know what it would be? It's that you grab the severed arm of whatever, like, European glasses guy most recently failed to reach his, like, design targets. And then you just hit someone with his name. So yeah, they have a football firm, very funny that that happens. I will note this is a passing name alert that their manager of Neil Messi is Brazilian, and his name is Pericles Chamusca. Just enjoy that information for a second.

One of the most Brazilian names I have ever heard. Completely normal football manager, but his name is Pericles. The only way we could make that more Brazilian is if he was called Pericles. Funny you should mention full name Pericles Ramundo Aliva Chimuska We gotta get

like stiglitz in there as well And maybe like a Digivani Anyway So he says I was a player For Al Sikoro

And then they got bought By Neom I switched to being a fan I'm too fat to play anymore So the best thing I can do Is cheer for my team To be better We made a noise

That was so loud today It was dangerous And we will win That's really good Delivered in in like your reading stuff affects as well. Anyway, so what I like, though, is I'm skipping ahead a little bit, because this isn't really a full reading.

Don't worry. I'm going to read that in the orker article. Mishari Amitari, the chairman of Neum S.C, was a man of influence. He was not a member of the House of Saad, but he did have one of the most powerful jobs at Neum as the executive director of government affairs. And also the captain of the owner of the football team, the manager, excuse me of the football team.

Apparently is his boss, yeah. Yeah, yeah. It highlighted just how important those in charge viewed as the football club's in the own future. said, this is part of the revolution led by His Royal Highness. We're trying to add DNA to this club by building the structure so we can compete with the other big clubs in the kingdom. But the players and staff, they all say they're not just attracted by money to play in Tabu.

Because that's the solution, right? So they don't have the 500 meters off the ground football stadium. They could also do a 500 meters off the ground banana ball stadium and this stilts guy just goes over. We just TikTok dance off the side. Is that they're just, what they've done is they've just basically set up shop in another city. So Neom S.C. plays in Tabook. Which is a completely like normal

setting. Yeah, this is a regular place has the Neum football team. I think what attracted them all to Neum is the project. And what they're aiming for the project, of course, is everything we've talked about whenever we talked about Neon.

But it's also, and this is another orb callback to win the Club World Cup and take it from the Oval Office. Yeah, of course. You two can get the most microphone by weight trophy in the world. They say, so they're basically, we're going to incubate this club

in this little city. We're going to steal it, Oakland Day's style, incubated in the desert, and then transplant it to the line just in time for the 2034 World Cup, just in time. They're going to nail it. It's a just in time delivery, you know? Yeah, exactly. So they're doing trust the process and the process is like hoping Saudi Arabia develops like non-Petro industries. Yeah. Or hoping that Saudi Arabia gets temporary exemptions from the laws of physics, such that it can build its line. So also I love that they're like, oh, we don't know if we're going to get promoted in the Saudi Premier League this year. And it's like, no, them being in the Premier League is pretty important to the neon project. So I'm pretty sure MBS are going to have security guys.

Are you suggesting that the Saudi royal family exercises an improper influence in football in Saudi Arabia? No. Do you mean to suggest to me that the Saudi Pro League is in any way politically compromised? I think that's preposterous. Nobody tells me where to kick. I told you I'd have some neon for you and I did Oh this was this was delightful thank you I love I just every time every time someone has to like take it seriously

Like oh we really we were really working hard to get that promotion to the sounding premier league Who knows it's a real mail biter I'm making a prediction right 20th 30 Charlton will you know they will they will sort of do very well in the champions league they'll finally get to Premier League and then they will be the first team from England and more importantly from South London to be champions in Saudi Arabia. I think the thing is right because we know English shortwall teams are perfectly willing to sell out to Saudi. But there is one team that is willing to sell out even more than that, right? I have the funniest proposal possible, which is you take M.K. Don's and you just turn them into the neon dons.

And then from all the way to Wimbledon to Milton Keynes to the line, you have the most betray. rail-fueled football club, and they can all lose against Cristiano Ronaldo. Well, wait, no, you can make Cristiano Ronaldo lose to them because of the thing. Oh, my God. Yeah, it could be like the San Marino football team finally wins. Cristiano Ronaldo with like a laser sight on his chest watching like a fifth guy from Wimbled, from like from Milsen Keynes get past him. It's just, it's Christian, there's a helicopter hovering over the field and there's just Cristiano Ronaldo's son

just stand just being dangled from it. We should revisit one of our old business ideas because many years ago we talked about buying a football team. Not like a big football team. We talked about buying like a non-league football team. Unfortunately, it was really fucked up that we said that in ayeshot of the Always Sunny cast because

like, okay, no, that would be the funniest thing actually is if on Saudi Netflix, they did a version of Welcome to Rexim but it's MBS instead of like Rob Bekellenian. and Ryan. Welcome to Neon.

Danny DeVito's still, like, there for some reason. Also, it's about football. And the football team involved is Thamesmead Football Club. Who are now, like, fucking reigning champions of, like, the Saudi Premier League. And no one knows why it's happened. And more importantly, no one knows why we still have the same, like, horrible concrete stadium. Yeah. Watching Welcome to Neon and being like, this feels really kind of exploitative when you're thinking about.

More than just the usual amount. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Also, why is the aviator Jim's still there? I promised you also that we're going to I told you, I told everybody we're going to read that New Yorker article

you know, the one with the outrageous interview that came out on June 2nd and nobody can shut the fuck up about it. I told you we're going to read it then we're going to do a sports related startup. Yeah, so I got, I got interviewed by Isaac what's up. I didn't show you guys.

Sorry, I completely, I missed a landing on my his question was, what's my name? square brackets pronouncing it wrong is it jocdner yeah so look everyone's been been i've been messaged this article like dozens of times because we've you know the new york article that came on in june second right oh of course yeah it's tusks up for the utah mammoth about the newest hockey team in utah and the adventures of two of their players in new york city let's fucking go yeah uh lauren this is this is what i actually have via you i think it's a perfect, it's a perfect athlete brain exchange that these guys have. Yes, this is great. It's not a long article. It's really funny. It's like, it's a great way to

signal to people that you read The New Yorker. I love reading the New Yorker and telling people about how much I read the New Yorker. It's really quick beat where they sent a couple guys from the new Utah Hockey Club to Canadians, very important because it's Canada funny. It's a very like Canadian funny sense of humor because the NHL recently changed their, they are going to be the Utah mammoth. It's going to be the, the Utah Mammoth. their NHL franchise. So they sent these two guys to the Museum of Natural History

in New York to see a mammoth skeleton and to talk to like the mammoth scientists. I mean, those two guys, we get Canadian hockey players. It's like, yeah, we're going to go meet with this mammoth in New York City. Not sure why he lives there.

You know, it's fine. I mean, he's probably really rich because he's really old. So that's how we can afford to live in New York City. Dude, we're going to be, we're going to be living in New York City. We're going to be living like mammoths. You're going to live like fucking mammoths, man.

Yeah. It's so Canadian hockey player. It's perfect. I laugh for hours reading this. This is, this, the owner of the Utah mammoths Wikipedia headshot has him wearing a backwards baseball cap. It's so cool. So basically, basically, this is, this, this is my favorite exchange from, from this athlete brain article. There's these two guys, they go to hang out with the mammoth and like interview the mammoth. They're, um, Sean, you're with the mammoth. Yeah, there's Sean Dersey and Alex Kerrfoot, both Canadians. First quote from Jersey, I love the museum. It's so cool.

Curflet admired a 60-foot skeleton of an apodosaurus, like a prosaosaurus. This thing's huge, eh? Dersie turned around. This was walking the earth at one point. You kidding me? You kidding me, bro? This fucking thing? I love, I love Canadians.

I love hockey players. This guys are beautiful. I always say, like, the stereotype of Canada. Canadians that most people have should be these guys. This is what we are. How many humans do you think to take down one of these guys, Kerfut asked. Dersie. Independently reinventing old Twitter jokes?

Dersie answers. I don't know. I don't want to fight it. I like these guys. But hypothetically, probably just me. I could do it. And an apennosaurus is better known as a brontosaurus. They weighed 35 tons.

Yeah. Well, have they ever been cross-checked? I am going to need you to know that Alexander Kerfoot majored in economics at Harvard. This was Dersey. This is Jersey who said this. Okay, sure. Okay. Kerrfoot responded, if it was me, I'd say 10,000. An entire legion of guys.

That's probably true. I think 10,000 people working together when we're moving up a tech tree could probably manage to do it. Like 10,000 of the primitive technology guy. I mean, at that point, your role is more you're kind of like a sea anchor on the mammoth, right? Like, your dead body is weighing the mammoth down. Yeah, you're overwhelming it in a human wave attack.

You're doing the same thing that those bees do when wasps get in their nests, right? Like, it gets too hot inside the ball of 10,000 Canadians for a mammoth to sustain life. I'm not 100% sure the players are aware that dinosaurs and humans didn't exist at the same time. I think it's like bringing up the concept of like egg-eating mammals.

is a little over their heads. Yeah. They don't quite get. I mean, look, they're great at hockey, but they don't quite get it. But when we talk about athlete brain and what this is such a good example of, how do you understand athlete brain, Laura?

I think it's very important to understand that every major professional athlete has only ever been good at their sport. And it's because they've only ever thought about their sport from the age of about six or seven onward. Like the level of professionalization that exists in sports now means they just don't have the time or ability to think about other things.

And I think hockey and you see it in baseball to you like third base especially, the less you're thinking the better you are at the sport. So those are not muscles they're super used to like engaging with on a regular basis. It's this you see it in football as over here as well where it's like anytime they'll always like bring Jack Grealish up to like do an interview where they're like, hey Jack Grealish, what's America? And he's like, I have no idea. What are you talking about? I have been thinking about put ball in that for like. It's very profound actually as an answer. Hey, Jack Grealish, are you aware of what country you're in? He's like, Wales? It's kind of fucked up as well because like, I'm assuming it's the same as it is for football academies here. Where what you do is you just grab a bunch of kids and go, okay, you don't really get an education. You are joining the circus, right? And at the end of that, you have this insanely competitive process to like become a professional athlete.

And if you don't make that, you just get kicked out on the curb with all I know how to, do is kickball into net and not well enough to like make a living off of that. And if you do make it, you end up on like, you know, the junior squad on like the Saudi, like, the Saudi Saracens or whatever. You are the guy who has to like stand next to Ronaldo while he gets his like, his kids life threatened so that the line dons can score on him. Yeah. And a huge part of this industry as well, this like,

grabbing guys, putting them through basically like the process you go through to become a space marine, but instead of dying if you don't make it, you just like have to go be like a real estate agent, I guess. Yeah. You know, as so much of this increasingly, so much of the economy around this is centered on gambling, right? Like this is, that is the biggest moneymaker in sports now. It seems it's not just, it's not like licensing. It's not, it's not licensed merchandise. It's not TV like broadcast rights. It's not ticket sales. It's gambling. Gambling, gambling. Well, that's why every shirt sponsor in football is the most unethical company you can possibly think of outside of like the arms industry. Yeah.

Which maybe they should get into it. Maybe I want to see like BAE Systems sponsor like a non-league team. I want to see some really niche arms industry players sponsor like Charlton S.C. Elbit. The Charleston are not an obscure team. They got to the Champions League this year. They're the best South London team that we've got. You don't live in South London anymore.

In my heart. In my heart, well, yeah, actually, that's true. The best South East, the best team in Southeast London now. That's still not true because Crystal Palace. They're in South East London. No, arguably a smell. But anyway, look, I'm going to like stop by, I'm going to, I don't want to get into trouble like Milo does whenever he talks about football. So I'm just going to understand.

They're the best team in a certain area. of Southeast London. They're the best team in central southeast London, south of Crystal Palace. Yeah, they're the best team in Charles. They're the best team of an area that touches the event. We're getting two inside Britain. We're going to pull it up because I have a startup for you all. It's called alt sports data.

Out sports data. Alternative sports data. It's looking at internal data and it's logging two sports in particular. One is called banana ball. The other is called quidditch. I think it's the data that's alternative rather than the sports so you're logging the players like haplogroups and like posting history my idea was that oh it's like gamble it's like sort of like normal sports gambling

but for like relatively obscure sports that no one really pays attention that much attention to doing uncut gems and and how he's got like an 18-wave parlay on a quiddish bag yeah it's like it's like all right new york giants pitcher logan webb how many books by non-male authors has he read this year. Trying to see how many members of the Maple Leafs can be the for a dollar name a woman

thing. Connor McDavid, we're going to see how long he can be friends with a woman without falling in love with her. The over and under is six weeks. Getting increasingly sentimental and profound and so you're just like looking at this shit and you're

making Austin Matthews watch in the movie. for love. And it's not even clear why you're doing that anymore, but somebody has money on it. You're trying, yeah, you're trying to fix the match. You're doing point shaving for like seeing if these guys, if Mitch Marner can be made into like a generous lover. I see you two are also on wicketia dot-org slash Toronto Maple Leafs hashtag players and personnel. These are the only players that I know because I looked at the New York Giants picture, but I do, I do know my Toronto I'm at police, unfortunately.

They've got a guy called Calais Jan Krock, Pontus Holmberg. Okay, next time I need names for anything, I'm looking at ice hockey players. This is beautiful. Anyway, anyway, no. Lauren, all sports data, what do you think? What do you think it is? This kind of thing is right across baseball now. So I'm familiar with a bunch of versions of this,

including a bunch of which are owned by teams in incredibly scary compromise ways. So I believe we discussed earlier, their main thing is, what was it? It was F1? Not quite. All sports data is bringing the next wave of consumers to sports betting. By empowering alternative leads to participate in legal

live betting, alt sports data enables their partners to activate, monetize, and retain fans with giving the world greater access to the sports they truly love. So what they do. What does that mean? They, I'll tell you. They collect odds on sports such as surfing, skateboarding, rally cross, drifting,

motocross. Oh my God, Hussein, you were right. Yeah, I wasn't that far off. Yeah, you were pretty much right. Darts, rodeo. Yeah, we got a really, really good clown in there who's going to be a rigger. Nobody knows he went to Golié. And so only we know.

So we got darts, rodeo, arena soccer, all combat sports. Coming soon is, of course, snowboarding and cycling. Uh-huh. And so then what happens, if you're draft kings or 32 Red or whatever, you engage alt sports data and then you can offer. because you have these odds now in this information feed, you can offer your customers

betting on fucking anything. Right. So I can go like the Tour de France which one of these like incredibly ripped twinks is going to like fucking die first. We'll get to like the kind of things you can bet on because it's crazy. Okay.

Because the other thing is it's all 100% live. Oh, okay. So the other thing. So but it's funny, you know what their newest sport is? What's the name is for? Alt sports data, the leading innovator in sports technology, the most electrifying company in sports technology.

Today, announced a groundbreaking partnership with Phoenix Real Time Solutions, the leading provider of scaling real-time streaming technology to provide real-time streaming of the second season one Mad Men reference. Gentlemen, imagine the perfect mixture of athletics, spectacle, and speed. High lie. Fuck off. You're telling me I set you up for that joke unintentionally. Yeah, like 35 minutes ago.

Oh, my God. Yeah. The chess master. I'm looking at you so differently now. Why do you think I brought up Mad Men in the first couple of minutes? It always comes back to Gilei in the end. He's good. Yeah.

You are all in my front on. I came to play. I'd realize streaming of Highline matches from the World High Line. High Eli League to the Hard Rock Cafe Sportsbook. This collaboration marks a significant milestone in bringing the fast-paced, exhilarating sport of Hiali to a broader audience of sports enthusiasts and betters. So yeah, this is, but this is the idea, right? Which is what if sports betting, this thing that is causing, I think, untold social damage

in places where it's become popular in the age of being accessible on a smartphone? It's causing untold social damage in the States. it's caused enormous, like, urban blight here as well in the UK. Like, sports betting is a curse. Yeah, of course. To be like, there's not enough of that. There are some long tales of, like, you know, soap-shoeing or whatever, or, you know, playing the spoons. And we could get people betting on that, which to me seems completely fucking evil.

Yeah, no, there's a direct correlation that's been proven for years between, like, a state here legalizing sports gambling and, like, a skyrocketing percentage of, like, bankruptcy declarations. It's, like, one-to-one. Yeah, and also, like, I also. think that the fact that sports gambling in the US became widely legalized and also completely destigmatized just like around COVID

meant that it just it turned a generation of young men into degenerate gamblers. And it's pushed by every major institution as well. There's no pushback in the States. No, of course. At all. I mean, if you want to talk about, well, exactly. You want to talk about the Labor Party's links to

the gambling industry, which are intense. Mm-hmm. Like, it's, it's It's wild and it's one of the most unambiguously evil things we regularly do. Yeah. It's also probably worth noting that like so many of like the AI companies, they are sort of very openly like gambling companies as well, right? And so that's going to be, that's going to be great, just all around. Well, any state that's sort of like wanting to be very open and different to AI companies

basically are just going to have to deal off a lot of, well, yeah, a lot of gambling. Yeah. Before I go on, I mean, you know, Lauren, as someone who's like, main thing is being engaged in sports. Can you sort of say a little more about how gambling has just changed people's relationship with it, with one another, with like the concept of having fun? Oh, for sure. It's changed like the fundamental nature of baseball itself.

We've seen that recently in like this huge, these huge changes to the league. For the longest time, the biggest black mark in baseball was professional sports betting scandals. It was the Chicago black socks and it was P. Rose. And we saw it like a couple weeks ago with P. Rose issuing a pardon, or sorry, of Donald Trump issues who didn't commit any crimes that he was arrested for him.

He certainly committed crimes. But like that they have totally sold out whatever integrity the league once had to the point where like there is now like the scandals of players getting caught with gambling apps on their phone that they're betting on is like happening more and more. It nearly touched the golden boy of the sport

when Shoho Tani's like best friend turned out to be defrauding him for millions of dollars so we could seek it all into gambling and baseball cards. Like several players have been suspended now arguably hypocritically because they've been caught gambling. And I think the most recent one was like an umpire got caught in a gambling scandal. It's like increasingly like threatening the sport itself in a way that like even a couple of years ago would have been like shockingly scandalous. And now everyone's on board because the athletic runs gambling articles that they put the odds on the screen.

It's, there's no part of the game that's like not touched by this. And I'm most bothered by it because I am like us. I appreciate baseball. for the stats. I'm a huge like Excel nerd when it comes to baseball. And I don't like seeing the pure innocent numbers that I love about the game, harnessed for evil, which is what essentially this is. You should just be able to appreciate them for what they are, which is weird, abstrue statistical anomalies, not something that you can be used to make money. Yeah, we're creating weird, abstrue statistical anomalies for their own sakes. Exactly. That's the joy of baseball.

Yes. Yeah, it's numbers are going up and down. And it's related to the thing you're seeing. And no one, the only people making money off is the guy selling hot dogs. Right. The point is that you should be able to talk down to the woman you're at a game with. Not like actually like profit in any way. No, of course. So back to alt sports data. It was founded by two guys who used to be executives at GoPro, one of whom was like the chief marketing officer. And they were like, oh shit, we have all these relationships with like professional snowboarders or whatever. Let's bet on this shit. Let's enable people to bet on everything. Let's enable them to gamble. The really baffling one here is power slap. They're giving, which I don't know if you're familiar with power. It's literally just a slapping contest. What you gamble on other than I think the bigger guy will get knocked down by the smaller guy? What other bet is possible?

Well, it's a really fun way to, like, even more than, like, football or boxing, get a bunch of, like, traumatic brain injuries. Just really get those going. Yeah. You begin betting on, like, when they'll sort of start forgetting stuff. You know, I bet, I don't know any power slappers. I bet, you know, power slap gym. No, the crazy Hawaiian. That's a power slapper.

Where did you pull that from? I'll tell you why it's that Because I look at Saudi sports And what Saudi money is investing in And the Saudis invested in a Power Slap match that was going to take place in Riyadh Where one of the guys was called

Dacrazy Hawaiian Amazing Yeah, it's all part of The Trump bribery Sort of system You know, I knew what it was I remember I talked about it On one of those episodes

Where it's 30 minutes of me talking Like just straight about something with like an expert on it. So that's why you didn't hear about it. But I still did pull it. It was from months ago. Anyway, so yeah,

we can bet it when Duck Crazy Hawaiian is going to start buying milk when he already has a full fridge full of milk and just drinking the expired milk. So he says,

there are a lot of leagues out here that are not the NFL, the MLB or the NBA, that quite frankly, I feel have been systematically set up for failure in sports betting because there's no real

innovation or thought put into them, said Todd Ballard, a alt sports data's chief marketing officer. Alt sports data also works of sports, there's a Formula One, which recently made the company its official sports betting supplier. Oh, that must have been, like, some of the biggest concentration of evil in one room outside of, like, Republican National Convention stuff. Oh, God, yeah.

Especially if they did it in, like, the Baku Grand Prix, if that's where they clinched it. Oh, my God, yeah. As well as the X games and the World Surf League have made all sports data their official gambling partner. Some of the biggest concentration of dumb guys in one room. Yeah. Someone who's like, I've been doing rollerblade flips since I was four. I have no other skills.

These guys came, these two GoPro guys came along and gave me $400,000, which is the most money I've ever seen in one place before. And now, apparently, I have to have a wearable because people are betting on my heart rate. I remember, I'm old enough to remember when Extreme Sports guys had listened to Goldfingers' spokesman one time in their life. And therefore, on the basis of that only, distrusted or professed to distrust corporate interest. So Ballard said lifestyle sports like this have massive fan bases but not much representation on sports books. We aren't milking these people. No one's just enjoying surfing. No, of course.

Yeah. So they say it's approach to targets bringing these fans into the sports betting ecosystem in sports they care about. You should be ashamed to write that copy. It's like their approach is getting children hooked on cigarettes. Yeah. You know, with fun cartoon mascots and fun fruit flavors. And that makes them comfortable. on betting on sports more broadly.

That's so fucking evil. But I think it's like there's an interesting point. There's a sort of point that I would say there's an evil point we made, which is just like... Twirl your mustache for me while you're making that point. No, I think their innovation is sort of like

to redefine what participation in like sports means, right? And basically linking gambling to participation in the same way that like, you know, e-cigarette companies have like, the ways in which they sort of like linked passive time or the concept of like passive time to like consuming their products because obviously you couldn't you know these bees were like you know e-cigarettes were not things that were supposed to be enjoyed in theory they were not supposed to be

hand for leisure they were supposed to be you know the sort of like play was oh you know there's their ways of like reducing you know smoking on cigarettes but like with this it sort of feels like okay like you know and i've heard this from like people at stake and stuff whenever they get criticized which is just like oh we're just opening new pathways for people to enjoy sports we're just wanting to like get more people to be sort of involved in sports and to have fun and There are lots of different ways to do that. What are you cheering for like Charlton because you like them? Right.

And this is it. Like your participation in sports is evil. You join a firm and beat people up or you gamble. Those are your two options. And I just feel like with a gamble, like it feels like the very obvious play here is to link sort of sports participation with gambling. And the ambition is for them to sort of like be like,

oh, you know, you can't just like watch sports. You can't just like, you know, watch it with your mates and like non-existent third spaces or whatever. But what you can do is, participate with them on these like very strange, very fast like gambling systems where you can make loads of money by like making very, very weird bets. But if you lose, you can share that with your friends and it can be really, really entertaining. So it's, and that's like, I mean,

it's incredibly evil, but it's also just like this feels like the most, this feels like the best way to sort of understand what these guys are doing, but also what basically every betting company, like e-bessing company is trying to do. I think that's totally correct. I think it's also demonstrably true in that you can like clearly see a huge upswing in those now more invested fans sending death threats to players on Instagram all the time. Yeah, because he's not just like the guy who missed the thing. He's the guy who cost you like $150,000 and it's going to get you uncar gems. I didn't I didn't even think about it like that but like no, you're right. And like imagine what that does if you're like you're a young player or if you're like someone who's just like in a very sort of precarious position in in terms of your own employment in sports and like you realize oh like you haven't just got. fans who are like kind of wanting to see like who are sort of depending on you but you also have people who have like remortgaged their houses perhaps to like have you know to do that. And it's one thing if you're like a professional athlete making you can water off your back if you're making millions of dollars hopefully. But like this is also a huge problem than college

sports where like tons of people who are not getting paid are getting these like people coming out of the woodwork to like scream at them at games about like oh you cost me my parlay in the middle of like a women's college basketball game. It happens all the time now. Jesus. Yeah, it's going on here. There's another, I read an interview with their chief data scientist in one of the most evil publications that exists, which is called Sigma. And it's like about, it's like buy and for the sports betting technology industry.

Oh, cool. Yeah. Awesome. So Sigma News spoke with co-founder Michael Jordan and director of data science, Tim Wall, different Michael Jordan, still gambling, but different Michael Jordan. To find out just what the company's vision means to the sports betting industry. We believe that the real opportunities with iconic sports like F1 are things happening moment to moment within the race. So whether the fifth position car will overtake the fourth position car on an upcoming turn is way more engaging than who's going to win the race in like two hours.

Which is, it's insane. They're like bet on every moment. Yeah, it's like micro transactions. Yeah. It's like they're microbe. No, don't micro bet. Macro bet. Just macro bet on everything. Everything that happened. So, you know, our bit at the beginning of just like, does Connor McDavid read female authors is not so far off. So Jordan says, we recognize that sports betting was becoming legal in the U.S. Wow. Well noticed.

Yeah. Yeah. Likely thing for a sports betting company to do. And so we wanted to boost the economy of these sports for the players. For the players. We did it for the players. Yeah. Well, thanks.

Yeah. Because, you know, the alternative sports don't have gambling. So the players are underpaid because they don't have gambling. So these athletes put it all on the line for our entertainment And almost all of them have full-time jobs to support themselves We want to build up our league partners to the point where athletes earn enough without a second job Admirable Sure

No, not admirable of course I was so excited Yeah The vision is second by second betting Bet by the millisecond We want the fan to be fully immersed Watching the event lives and placing bets constantly as the action unfolds They want to be part of every moment

not just the final score. That's what it is, right? It's like, you're buying your way into feeling like Lando Norris for a second. I have some good numbers into what is it looks like in practice. And it goes back to the, um, showyotani gambling scandal over his assistant.

Ipe Mizuharo was stealing millions of dollars from him, impersonating him. Uh, and this is someone who had essentially had unlimited funds to gamble all they wanted. And between December, 2021, January, 24, uh, both through apps and through illegal bookies, he placed 19,000 bets or about 25 bets per day. So that's the ceiling.

on this. That's like the most human could possibly gamble. That's and they're like, hey, 25 per day. Let's get that to 25 per like lap of Formula One. Yeah. You know, what if we could increase the fucking thing? Yeah, what if there was more? And what if there was more in more places?

I keep reading in this, more evil sentences than the previous ones. There's no reason why sports betting can't be as fast and immersive as video games. Uh-huh. Oh boy. Not that the game, the video game industry doesn't have its own gambling problem with loot boxes and stuff.

Video games are trying to be gambling. Gabbling's trying to be video games now. Yeah. Or just like lag issues. Isn't Matt just like a very obvious tech kind of thing? Just like... Oh sure. If you're closer to the stadium, you get an advantage. Yeah, if you're doing like microbedding or speed betting or whatever, then like...

Some would call this wire fraud. All sports data's vision reads like sci-fi minus the dystopia and with a lot more fun wagering. Oh, okay, good. Yeah, they took out the dystopia. Where there was dystopia, they added in fun. Unwagering. Hmm. Wee.

They think of a fully AI curated broadcast stream tailored in real time to your preferences, bets, and behaviors. I see it as a holistic stream. Driver camp, dynamic views, personalized narration, all based on what you've bet on historically. Your screen isn't just showing you the game.

The commentator's speaking directly to you as you gamble. Uh-huh. And he's telling you so much about madman. Yeah. As a sports fan, how does this sound to you as a way to consume baseball? Sorry, banana ball. because there's no more baseball now.

That's true, but it's all banable all the way down. I am of the opinion that most sports should be watched with absolutely nobody talking to me. If I could turn off the announcer on any broadcast, I would. Unfortunately, that technology doesn't exist yet. I don't like the we're now generating new ways of guys to annoy me when I'm trying to watch a game. Yeah, and also, like, probably encouraging you to gamble.

I mean, the regular broadcast does that too. Yeah. But encouraging specifically you. Like, hey Lauren, you know you always like to bet on a foul ball, sometimes around this point of the game. Why not put up your favorite bet? So, the AI knows your favorite athletes, fantasy picks, and social follows. It cuts the right camera angle, remembers your last wager, and offers frictionless voice-activated

bets. That's what I was thinking is the problem with gambling. Too much friction. Yeah, also, I think it's a really good idea to have an AI that sounds like a human and sounds like it wants to be your friend to tell you like, yeah, just try again. Try again. It'll work this time. It'll work again.

Yeah, we've invented the world's most persuasive bartender and he never cuts you off. Yeah, I was going to say, we've invented like the guy in the pub who like keeps telling you, like even both the slot machines broken and you never win anything. And so yeah, just put in just put in like another tenor, you'll win it, you'll win it, you'll win it, you'll win it. You can put in a coin, you're going to spin it, and then that actually makes you more likely to win. So they give an example. There's a key turn coming up, Kate. Want to put $5 an Albin overtaking Antonelli?

I don't, I don't agree that would happen that much because Alex Albin's not that great. But how much would I win? you could win $11. Okay, place bet. Great, let's see what happens. There we go. That's, hey, what if instead of having to like look at an amount, type it in, hit a button, are you sure?

Yes. They were like, no, that causes people to pause too much. We need them doing bigger and dumber easily. They're now at this point, like, positing that AI shouldn't be the computer from Star Trek. It should be like if the computer from Star Trek was trying to rob you. Yeah. The computer from Star Trek, if they were trying to, like, trap you in debt. think video game speed

Netflix personalization and odds for every moment. It's fast, it's immersive at little times, at times it's a little absurd but more importantly it is possible no it's not, it's not possible. It's absolutely not possible what they're saying that they're going to do. So that's how we're all going to lose everything

by trying to impress the AI with our high-al-eye bets. I'm excited. Now, Lauren, I asked you to curate some wacky baseball players for us and I would be very pleased if you could share them. Certainly.

I've got a couple here that I think are okay. Unfortunately, baseball is not really in an era of great villains because there are obviously a lot of like Trump supporters and conservatives,

but they're all like the whiny kind of conservative that doesn't want to own their opinions. So like anytime they do something that's like obviously a Trump thing, they'll like reel it back and try to pretend it's not. First example I had of this was Alec Berlson and a couple guys

in the St. Louis Cardinals who shortly after Trump got shot started putting one hand on their ear and one hand up in the fist in the air, like the fight, fight, fight thing. They'd hit a double and they'd all do it in the dugout. And their excuse for why they weren't doing the Trump thing was that

one of the players was a college rapper named Biscuit. And it was a reference to a DJ listening to his headphones. So they were trying to do like a Trump Jesse Owens thing. Uh-huh. Jesus. I like that one of the players was a college rapper

called Biscuit. It's a athlete who has one more thing about him. Hmm, compelling. That's a very like, that's a very like baseball-coded, like, big d h lump of a guy thing to do yeah yeah so i also i i do enjoy the uh yeah the uh no don't nobody's allowed to get mad at me my job is hit ball i'm gonna be a big trump guy but if you ever if you ever get mad at me then i'm gonna get so depressed i shave off my mullet basically it's all that up and down yeah we saw it with manny machado when he was wearing a let's go brandon shirt at spring

training he's another one who's like a famous red ass throughout the sport and he's like the king of plausible deniability. He will like slide into guys running from first to second and then like pretend it was an accident. He'll like stop on players like legs and kick him in the heels and stuff running through the base. And every single time he just pretends it, he's just like hustling. He's the total. He's, he's a baseball version of what we in hockey call a goon. Very much so. Well, I think good is more honorable profession than being Mani Machado. There's a history there. Like this is how baseball was played 30 years ago. The rest of the sport has moved on and he is just out there breaking ankles for the love of the game. It's like, look, it's all too woke now. Everyone's trying to protect their ankles.

I'm going to play baseball like they used to back in the good old days of 1990s when you were allowed to take steroids and you could really roid rage out on someone else's like metatarsal. Right. And guys like him would like get raciously called out for lack of hustle every single day. Yeah. Fascinating guy. Also probably a borderline Hall of Fame or unfortunately. Yeah. I mean, there must be so many borderline Hall of Fame baseball players who are just like utterly reprehensible people. Oh yeah. It's been a repeated scandal in the last couple of years where they keep taking their like candidacies right in before they get elected into the hall. Another funny one, because we're LGBT hosts on a baseball podcast.

We keep really close watch on like Pride Night stuff. And one of my favorite scandals of the last couple of years was when five players in the Tampa Bay Rays peeled the Pride Night logo off of their hat. And again, it was that thing where like they didn't want to own what they were doing. They were like, we disagree with the lifestyle, but we still want the stadium to be for everyone. They couldn't just say no, we don't think they should be here. Yeah, they had to be like, no, the sticker was slightly weighing down my helmet, and I was not going to be able to respond to curveballs. Exactly.

Taylor Wals is also the reason he was part of that. He's like a fun one because he's invented a new way to insult umpires recently that I really enjoy. This came up at a game the other day where, again, he denied doing this. But it was like a borderline bad call, the umpire got wrong. It was like slightly outside the strike zone. He called it a strike. So Taylor Wals discovered he can really get piss off the empire and get thrown at the game. Just by tapping his head.

hand on the top of his helmet. What is it with umpires? Why are they, why are they so sensitive? You can just aggrove them like a SkyR of MPC. Pretty much. And like this is, this one's funny because the context is that they're working on an automated strike zone system with a computer. And the way you challenge in that system that you want a call revealed is you tap the helmet. So he's really like, it's a pretty firm fuck you to the umpire saying like, I think your job should be replaced. Yeah. Okay. So that's more of like a learn to code thing to the umpire. Yeah. to become code. Yeah.

Get ready to go, like, get a real job. Yeah. Yeah. You should go get a real estate license with all the other guys who couldn't make it up to this level, basically. Yes. Getting kicked out of umpire school is brutal. Yeah. They had those two umpires go visit the mammoth in New York City.

And they were like, you're fucking out of here. This is another thing where we joke, but like it actually is like incredibly competitive to be like a professional level umpire. They do go to umpire school. It is like hyper competitive. There is like one woman who's gone through the program and suffered her throat abuse the whole way. It's like all the same thing for sports, but the umpires get to do it too. I would love to see the umpire schools baseball team.

Like what meticulous rule following? Who else he got? I think this goes back a couple years. And this is more like a funny one. It goes back to COVID. There is a window of time in the 2022 season where Canada had a requirement that you need to be vaccinated across the border. And baseball is obviously played in Canada in Toronto.

So. Famously. Famously. So there was this window of time where we actually got to see into the inner brains of players in a way they're usually closed off from. And we got to see the sheer number of player meatheads who refused to get vaccinated and so had to be left at home on the road trip to Toronto. And we could really close. We actually at the time, a podcast did like statistical analysis of what the team was leaving behind. My personal favorite. You could have gotten advantages in betting markets. Which of these red asses is not going to go across the border. People did. The Kansas City Royals left. 10 players at home for the game series. They basically fielded a AAA team in Toronto because there are too many guys in that team were just like suckers. My favorite was the Red Sox leading Cutter Crawford

and Tanner Howe home twice on two different series because they're in the same division. They play more often. And like Cutter Crawford was a starting pitcher that year. He probably cost them several winning games in a very competitive league. If you wanted to do point shaving in like 2021, all you'd have to do is open up

Facebook in front of any one of these players. And then they would like refuse further vaccinations. For a long time, I think actually like the real like success you could, the trick you could find in baseball gambling isn't to follow the players. It's to follow their wives on Instagram because they're the ones who I think get them into the conspiracy theories. Oh yeah. I think they're the ones in like the alternate health yoga websites because these guys don't

think about any of this stuff. They're getting it, I think, from the wags. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. They hit ball with dick. and then ball go. And I don't get jabbed.

No, I do crystal. Like being married to a dog. Yeah. All right. All right. I think that's about time for us today. But Lauren,

I want to thank you so much for coming on this little bit of a behind the scenes look here, frequently rescheduled due to personal conflicts with my schedule episode of the podcast. It's been a delight to have to be. Yeah. They won't let me go to Canada where, where of course I record. Every Monday and Thursday, I fly to Canada.

A little to any of the day. of you know that I've actually been making secret bets on when this episode was going to take place. And I may have got a very healthy 10 pounds and 50 pence. Yeah, yeah. You kept on booking me those appointments all across town when we otherwise had to be recording. It was a very long, it was a very long complicated process, but it was, but was it was worth it? Yes, it was. Absolutely. So where, where can people find batting around if they want to hear more about baseball statistics? Yeah, sure. We're betting around. We're betting around. I think that is the handle on blue sky. where it's batting underscore around on most other social platforms.

We talk about baseball maybe 60% of the time. So I wouldn't recommend people who don't like baseball at all. But yeah, we're pretty niche. Yeah. So if you like baseball 60%, then do we have the podcast for you? Anyway, anyway. But Lauren, it's been a real delight. It's been a long time coming.

Thank you very much for coming on. And to you, the listener, a few things. I'm going to try to remember all of them. TF Live Show is on the 21st of June. We're going to be doing that. We're going to actually be doing the Curtis Yarvin article. The Curtis Jarvin Longroom. We're going to talking all about Yarven.

We'll all be weeping openly on stage all the time about stuff we made up and I had. It's going to be cool. We're all going to be awkwardly wearing leather jackets as though we're trying to look like excess cigarette advertisement but failing. I listen. Maybe. Anyway, that's going to be a good time. Because you said that, I might not. Oh, no.

I'm going to. No, that was going to be my thing like unintentionally anyway. I'm just, I'm catching strays meant for Curtis Yavin. It's rife. Anyway, we have that happening. It's also lions led by donkeys and glue factory, either side of that. It's some kind of a podcast festival thing. I haven't really paid too much attention.

But there is that. You can go to all of them variously. Doesn't matter. Come see us and the rest. Otherwise, there's an Edinburgh show on July 31st. That one is selling really quickly. So do get involved. If you are going to be in Edinburgh,

on July 31st. Or even if you're not, you know, buy a ticket. Well, we want people in the room so it sounds full. Oh, yeah, that is true. Okay, fine. I guess so. Yeah, buy a ticket and transfer it to someone else. But make sure they listen to the show because it's awkward if we're doing a live show in front of people who don't listen to the show.

Just come. You know, why if you buy a ticket, just come. It's way easier that way. All right, all right. I think that's all the end matter. So we will see you on the free episode in a few short days. You left on Red is coming. We're recording that tomorrow.

Yes. It's happening. M. Son of the century. I am, I'm walking around just saying Italian names like Philippe like Felipeo Gerrati. Oh, what a tragic figure. Who will talk about tomorrow?

Anyway, that's all the end matter. Left on Red's now coming back. There was a whole bunch of stuff that made it not happen for a few months, but it is back. It is back with a vengeance in a big way. We are leaving things on Red. Okay. We will see you on Monday

for the free episode. Bye, everybody. Bye. Bye. Thank you.